Granola

“We're not at a negative gross margins right now”

“If Granola just knows everything I say in all meetings after a certain time, I think Granola's gonna have a very good idea of where, you know, I succeed and where I could get better.”

“What we found is that a lot of the most interesting queries that people have like would completely fail with that type of method. So for example, query might be like, what are all the things I didn't do a good job explaining. Or tell me what are all the bugs t…”

“We looked at it all and we cut out 50% of it. We basically redesigned and cut out 50%.”

“The biggest competitor that Granola had from day one and even today is Apple notes.”

“If I ever see any copy that has English spelling instead of American spelling that goes out, I throw a hissy fit because I want everyone to think we're an American company.”

“Our strategy has been to use the latest and greatest. And when we feel like we hit a wall and the only way to make the experience better is then to fine tune or train models. And we will do that.”

“So the most expensive thing about our business is actually transcription. And historically it's been actually transcription and high quality transcription versus LLM inference.”

“And in a way the product we have today is, is a Trojan horse to collect a lot of your context so that you can then use all the information in that context to do future work.”

“So our general our philosophy that's gotten us here, and it may not get us there as we scale, is we make most product and design intuition, sorry, decisions based on Intuition.”

“Every time a new model comes out, we have to completely change or tweak the prompts that we use for note generation to provide consistency of experience and an improvement of experience.”

“I think that the world we're moving towards is You have a bucket of context, and then you generate documents or artifacts on, on a per need basis on the fly.”

“I'm sure that two years from now, three years from now, everyone's going to be using something like granola. Like, I'm hoping it's granola, but if it's not granola, something like granola, just because it is so useful and will get so much more useful over time…”

“We know granola will be a general product, a horizontal product, lots of different types of people are going to use granola”

“So we basically spent a year onboarding people, learning what was wrong about it, making fixes to that onboarding a new set of people.”

“I we did this was last maybe November so we're based in London, right, and we went to SF for a board meeting, and someone on the team said, hey, should we rent out a bar and just email users and say if you'd want to come? And we'd like, sure, you know, and we …”

“And in, in those early phases, like when I was looking for a co-founder, I met Sam, but I was also, I met all the LLM experts from Imperial and Oxford and Cambridge. Because I thought that was DNA we would need on day one. And as Sam and I started prototyping,…”

“I think that would have been impossible or extremely hard to do if we had been publicly launched.”

“We're doing a kind of a, this really incredible, like deep research mode across that can look at thousands of meetings in a matter of seconds and pull out these insights and, You know, that's not something that our enterprise customers are asking for right now…”

“And our philosophy since the beginning of Granola is always to build for the world a year from now, because by the time we build it and it gets distribution the costs of those models or those capabilities will come down to a reasonable place.”

“It's the, I think the combination that granola is useful to folks and we can send notifications at the right moment to start it.”

“What I do expect is I expect the cost of inference to stay the same or go up as we allow users to do much more complicated queries over much larger data sets.”

“And we aim to do, I think Sam and I aim to do four to six calls a week with users, but constantly not like, oh, we're doing a sprint on this feature. It's actually, we try to book them Every day, always.”

“And we only let users choose their model on chat. On the note generation side, we completely abstract it away.”

“Even though we could store the audio and that would be useful, we do not store the audio. So we don't record the audio”

“I think the failure mode is that we optimize for today's world. So we optimize for today's product and today's world and today's needs. And it's easy when you just talk to users and you get these requirements or you talk to enterprises. You just kind of, it's …”

“I have a version of granola that will go through my 2500 meetings and spit out a remarkably intelligent answer to that in 20 seconds.”

“If granola acts as a second brain for you, like our goal, the next step there is to be a kind of a second brain for your team or for your company.”

“Like, the machine does something much better than took me, you know, a couple of decades to figure out.”